


Pride and just a little prejudice

by Roadstergal



Category: Red Dwarf
Genre: Aliens, Beer, Computers, Fairies, Gen, Sherlock Holmes - Freeform, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Freeform, Spaceships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-30
Updated: 2015-06-30
Packaged: 2018-04-07 00:18:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4242207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roadstergal/pseuds/Roadstergal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rimmer has some brilliant thoughts around fairies.  He knows they're brilliant, and who is better to judge their brilliance than him?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pride and just a little prejudice

"Fairies," Rimmer noted, thoughtfully, his long fingers gently stroking his skinny chin.

"Eh?" Lister asked, not looking up from the fingernails he was trimming with his pen-knife.

"He said 'fairies,'" Holly noted, helpfully.  "It's Pride Day, after all..."

"Not that sort of fairy, you addled blonde pixellated dolt," Rimmer snapped.  " _Actual_ fairies."

It was going to be one of _those_ conversations, Lister noted with resignation.  "Fairies, like – the birds with the wings?"

"Birds generally do have wings, Listy, excellent observation.  If you're referring to diaphanous, beautiful _women_ with wings, yes, that is exactly what I'm referring to."

"Why?" Lister leaned back, yawning.  "Are you wanting a fairy story?  Cat has a few."  The mythology of Cats, it turned out, didn’t stop at just the story of Cloister and poor dead Frankenstein.  They had many stories of fairies, evil chirping creatures who were hunted by brave Cat warriors.

"Not _stories_ , Lister.   This isn't about stories.  This is about a brilliant man, a genius, a man whose sight was so broad that his brilliance seemed,” Rimmer spread his hands over-dramatically, “ludicrous to the general populace."

Lister tried to think of Rimmer's heroes, random names of, invariably, white men rolling through his mind. "Oliver North?" he hazarded.

"No, you twonk.  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle!" Rimmer enunciated the honorific with great pomposity.

"Oh, yeah!  He's the one who wrote that saying, yeah?  The 'no shit, Sherlock' one?" Lister appreciated that one.  It was brilliant.

Rimmer rolled his eyes so far back into his head that Lister wondered if he might lose them.  " _No_ , Lister.  He created the incomparable detective Sherlock Holmes."

This was too much fun not to play with.  "The one in the mac?"

"You're impossible," Rimmer sighed.

"Nah, nah." Lister dropped his pen-knife and waved at Rimmer, his hand going through the man slightly.  It wasn't like he had a lot to do today anyway.  "I'm just yankin' your chain.  Tell me all about the fairies."

Rimmer snorted and shrugged his shoulders, but he was clearly dying to tell _somebody_ , and there weren't a lot of options.  "The Cottingley fairies.  Some girls presented Sir Doyle with photographs of fairies - proper fairies, tiny women with wings.  The skeptics say they were just cut-outs, but really!  Sherlock Holmes was a genius, so Sir Doyle must have been even more of a genius!  He was not one to be fooled by simple paper cutouts!"

Lister drained the rest of his lager.  This tale would require a few more, he was sure, but that would require getting up, and he was disinclined to.  "Right, yeah..."

"Aliens!" Rimmer raised his forefinger in the air, his holgraphic eyes glittering.  "Aliens, Lister!  They clearly came to Earth to communicate with this brilliant man, this _genius_.  They got a little lost..."

"They got lost?" Lister giggled.

"Well, who among us hasn't gotten lost on the way to Bradford?" Rimmer asked, testily. "But my _point_ , Lister, is that this man has been unfairly maligned!  He knew that these fairies were aliens, products of an advanced civilization!"

"Okay, so we have some fairy-alien-bird-things," Lister said, feeling like he might actually be up to the hike down to the lower storage decks to bring up another pallet of lager, "so what?"

"So." Rimmer leaned close, so eager that he didn't even notice that he put his hand right through a wilting curl of orange peel and three discarded nail clippings on the table.  "Aliens that were as advanced as that in the 1900s - interstellar travel, such amazing fashion sense! - well, can you imagine how much more advanced they would be now?  They could surely give me a body!"

"Yeah, well, it's not Bradford and it's sure as smeg not the 1900s," Lister noted, his brows gathering close to his eyes for moral support.

"Yes, it's been a few million years.  But they wouldn't abandon their home base!  And from the literature searching I've been doing over the past few weeks - I have substantial evidence, given spectral alignments on the nights in question, that the base is actually near Canopus.  We're heading that way."

Lister shook his head firmly.  "No, we're _not_ , Rimmer.  We're heading back to Earth."

"What, so you can have a sheep farm on an underwater island with a dead woman?  Don't be ridiculous, Listy, this is the only sensible course of action."

"Sensible?  Looking for smeggin fairies somewhere almost... Holly, how far is Canopus from Earth?"

Her blonde head popped back up on the screen.  "I reckon about a hundred parsecs from Sol, Dave," she replied.  "We'd have to rotate the tires to get there and back."

"No." Lister shook his head again.  "No way."

"Not fairies, you idiot, aliens!  Aliens who could give me a body!  Holly..."

"Sorry, Arn, Dave is the most senior living crew.  I gotta do what he says."

"Oh, _really_.  Well, isn't that nice.  Maybe you'd go there if there _were_ real fairies, big hairy men with false wings on.  Wouldn't that make you _proud_." Rimmer did not cease his angry muttering as he stomped out of the room, his incorporeal feet failing to make any sort of sound that would make the kind of punctuation he clearly desired.

He always, Lister noted, made gay jokes when he was particularly upset.  Odd, that.  "Hey, Hol," Lister said, thoughtfully, "is Arn gay?" He had never really thought about it much - well, Rimmer's sexual preferences weren't the sort of thing he _wanted_ to think about much. But the smegger did drum on it so!

"Dunno, Dave. It's not noted in his personnel files.  He dreams about it a lot, but you know. Not official data."

"Dreams?" Lister sat up.  "You have access to his dreams?"

"Yeah, of course.  His light bee is the old sort, and it's linked to me for processing power.  I can tell you more..."

"Uh, no.  That's all right."

"It's okay, I get bored.  There's one he has a lot, where Alexander the Great..."

"No, Hol, really," Lister interrupted.  "None of my business!"

"Well, all right, but any time, you know." She blinked.  "Oh smeg, he's making a mess with the Scutters down on B deck.  Back in a jiff."

Well, that was something, wasn't it.  Something that indeed motivated Lister to bring up a pallet of lager.  Two pallets, really.  At this rate, there was no way the beer would last a million years.


End file.
